Anonymous Hackers Swat At Syrian Government Websites In Reprisal For Internet Blackout

The defaced website of Syria's Belgian embassy, with a message from the Syrian faction of Anonymous' hacker collective.

"When your government shuts down the Internet, shut down your government," goes the slogan popularized by the hacker group Anonymous. As Syria blacked out its digital connections Thursday, the group seems to have settled for the tactic that it knows best: shutting down and vandalizing the few government websites that remain online.

Beginning Thursday afternoon, the loose hacker collective went on a spree of attacks against various Syrian government targets hosted outside of the disconnected country, including embassy websites in China, Australia, Saudi Arabia and other government sites including that of the Baath political party and the Syrian railway system. Most of those sites were flooded with junk traffic designed to take them offline, but some Anonymous factions hacked and defaced target sites, instead, including the Syrian embassy in Belgium and the Syrian Industrial Bank.

"The Cartoon Syrian Army website has been hacked in response to the cyber bullying they're practicing," read a lengthy statement posted in English and Arabic to the vandalized Belgian embassy site. The message also included praise for the Syrian rebel forces and a rebuke of the West's role in the Middle East.

To our heros in the Free Syrian Army...our hearts and souls are with you those of whom sacrificed their blood and lives for us, may Allah reward you...To United States and Europian [sic] countries, you claim that you protect the world, help the oppressed and claim democracy. But our revolution exposed your real faces and showed humanity that you are advocates of your own interests and that you don't have a humanitarian principle in what you claim.

Though many of Anonymous' targets went offline temporarily overnight, most were back online Friday morning. Others remain offline, though it's not clear whether their downtime is a result of the hackers' attacks or Syria's abrupt disconnection from the Internet.

Syria's networks have been dark since Thursday morning, as the Free Syrian Army entered the capital city of Damascus in the latest round of fighting that has already killed 40,000 people in the country. The Syrian government has claimed in statements to the press that the country's Internet connections were severed by a "terrorist" attack. But an analysis by the hosting firm CloudFlare seems to show a coordinated shutdown of the country's network routes between the state-run Syrian Telecom Establishment and foreign internet providers, casting doubt on the possibility of a physical attack taking down Syria's networks. "The systematic way in which routes were withdrawn suggests that this was done through updates in router configurations, not through a physical failure or cable cut," reads a blog post from the firm.

Anonymous posted a statement blaming the outage on the Syrian government and calling on its affiliates to retaliate against the regime. "Anonymous will NOT allow this massive violation of the human rights of the free Syrian people go un-punished," the statement reads. "We feel this is a desperate move by a dying regime, one that has slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent civilians." It promised "take-downs, defacements, data dumps, E-Mail bombs and black fax attacks."

The statement was accompanied by the group's usual forboding YouTube message, this time delivered in Arabic.

Despite its bluster, Anonymous' web attacks have little more than symbolic effects in a conflict that has already taken an entire country off the digital map. But the defacements and site shutdowns are just the latest in its string of attacks on Syria's government, which have in some cases resulted in troves of stolen documents.

Even so, Anonymous' efforts show the limits of hacktivism to penetrate a country that no longer has any digital connections. Syria's government may be annoyed by the hackers' flood of web attacks and embarrassed by Anonymous' releases of officials' hacked documents. But until the country's networks are plugged back into the world, few of Syria's citizens will even notice the their efforts.